What is the most fundamental cause of all the war, disharmony and suffering in the world? What causes human beings to create murder weapons and destroy other living beings' experience of life by killing and mutilation? What causes there to be unhappy fates and causes human beings to be so depressed and tired of life that they commit suicide. There is only one single thing that is the cause of all this, and that is terrestrial human beings' own view of life. It is human beings' view of life and existence that is the foundation of their way of being towards their surroundings, and this way of being cannot exist without being the cause of effects. It can be the cause of cruel effects, and it can be the cause of the most divine and pleasurable effects for our surroundings and thereby for ourselves. The effect that our way of being, which is based on our view of life, has on our surroundings causes them to react, and to us their way of being will be either pleasant or unpleasant. We will be considered as their fate's evil or good spirit, according to whether our way of being to them is pleasant or unpleasant.

Our view of life is something fundamental in existence, since it releases causes and effects that become fate for us. It has done so in the past, it is doing so in the present and it will also do so in the future. Since human beings want the future to be better than the past and the present, it will be of the greatest importance how human beings' view of life eventually turns out. What does the majority of human beings' view of life look like today? It is the case that by far the majority think that they are being treated unjustly. They think that a great many human beings are not behaving towards them in a way that, in their opinion, they should, in fact they go so far as to express that it is these human beings' fault that in various ways things have gone badly for them. The injustice of life is a theme that many human beings gladly talk about, and one notices that disappointment and bitterness are fundamental in their view of life and existence. There is a saying: "One should not expect any gratitude in this world", and in saying this, one gives vent to one's bitterness and disappointment, one thinks that one should have deserved better, in other words, one thinks that one has sown better than the crop turned out to be. One thinks perhaps that one has shown certain people great friendship and had helped them in difficult situations but in return only received ingratitude, in fact perhaps even hostility and persecution, from them. How can this fit in with the thought that when one sows friendship and helpfulness one should also reap friendship and help?

In answer, I would say that to sow good seed does not always guarantee a good crop, if it has not been sown in a soil that is suitable for precisely this seed. It might be sown on stony ground and the wind might blow the seed away, and it might be sown in a soil that is so full of weeds that it chokes the good seed so that it is not possible for it to establish itself. The sower perhaps had the idea that he had sown in a good soil and he thought that he therefore also ought to have a good crop, but he was disappointed. It was not the seed that there was something wrong with, it was his idea about the soil that he sowed in that was wrong, and that was why he did not have the crop that he expected. It is this experience of the soil's greater or lesser ability to receive the seed and let it grow and give a good crop that Christ spoke about in his parable of the "sower". We are all "sowers" and we can all experience that we do not get out of our seed what we would like.

To be loving and helpful to one's neighbour will always be tantamount to sowing good seed. But just as the physical seed can grow only in soil that has been worked and cultivated for that seed, love and helpfulness can also give a good crop only from soil that is represented by human beings with a certain degree of maturity in their minds. If you have done something very good for some people, perhaps having totally sacrificed yourself for them so that to some extent you had to go without and suffer on account of it, without these people in any way having reacted by showing gratitude and mutual love, it is not the good conduct in itself that there is something wrong with. Neighbourly love can never in any situation be anything other than the best seed that exists. If you think there is "something wrong" with this situation because the good seed did not give a good crop you will be likely to think that the thing that is wrong is "the ungrateful people who just receive without giving anything in return, without even saying thank you". But that is not where the thing that is wrong lies. No human being can at this moment be any different than they are on the basis of the experiences they have had. It is a question of evolution, since every human being is on their special evolutionary step and cannot think and act on the basis of a maturity that they still do not possess. A child of two cannot act like a child of ten, or like an adult, and just as there are degrees of maturity regarding the human being's physical age, there are also degrees of maturity for the beings in a complete spiral cycle. Broadly it becomes visible as a result of the fact that a mineral is not as "mature" – that is to say, as highly developed – as a plant, and that an animal is more mature than the plant, and that a human being is more mature than the plant. Within these great areas of evolution there are a great many small evolutionary steps. Of course, this principle also holds in the case of the terrestrial human beings; a primitive human being cannot react in the same way as a really cultured human being, and primitive human beings are not to be found only in the primeval forest, they are to be found in their thousands in the civilised world. We therefore treat them as civilised human beings even though their civilisation is merely a surface under which the mentality of the primeval jungle still dominates. You cannot blame these human beings for not possessing culture. It would be the same as to blame a child for not being an adult. Such human beings cannot themselves determine how ready they are for "the good seed", for example; this is determined by their evolutionary step. So what it was that was wrong – if one can talk about something wrong – with the action in which a good turn did not appear to have its own reward, was neither to do with the good conduct itself or to do with "the people who showed ingratitude". It was exclusively due to the "sower" who was not familiar with the soil in which he sowed, and therefore mistakenly expected an abundant crop.

But is it wrong to be good and helpful towards your fellow beings, even though they are not able to receive it with gratitude? Of course not. That which can be wrong is to expect something in return for your efforts. A gift is not a gift, in the actual meaning of the word, if the giver is thinking about what he might possibly get in return, and peoples' love and their helpfulness should be gifts that the receiver should use in accordance with his or her greater or lesser ability to use them. Of course, it will make a great difference when more and more human beings develop an ability to judge the mental soil that they will sow in. The ability to judge one's fellow beings' mentality and evolutionary step is also something that is growing in the consciousness of those human beings who are consciously working on themselves from a genuine desire to be of benefit for the whole. Not a critical judgment based on a pharisaical satisfaction in "not being like these beings", but an ability to judge what would be the most loving way of acting towards human beings who need help but who display very little ability to show gratitude or to do something in return. There is also something called "naive kindness", and even though not everything that is given this name is really naive kindness, since hard, cold human beings are inclined to call all goodness "naive kindness", there is, however, a form of goodness that is extremely feeling orientated and without the control of intelligence, which can judge whether the human beings that will receive really have a use for what is being offered and whether they want to receive it. There are some human beings who give to right and to left without giving a thought to whether what they are giving will really be of benefit and a joy and not a nuisance to the receiver, which it perhaps is, and on top of it all the giver expects gratitude. There is an old saying: "When someone gives away his goods so that he is forced to become a beggar, take up a mallet and hit him on the head" and even though the saying is too brutal, there is nevertheless a grain of truth in it. For how can it benefit the whole that a human being gives absolutely everything away without giving it any thought, so that afterwards he will be a burden on others. That is not what life intends. Christ says that he who has two coats should give one of them to someone who has no coat; he does not say that one should give them both away so that he himself has to go without.

Apart from the fact that true naive kindness can do more harm than good in many situations, one absolutely must say that on the whole it is far better to sow a little too much of the good seed even though some of it falls on poor soil than to not sow it at all, to say nothing of the fact that it is better than sowing the bad seed however the soil is. If one does not sow good seed, that is to say loving thoughts and actions, one's life will be barren and empty, and if one sows weeds, in the form of anger, hatred, bitterness, jealousy, bad temper and hard-heartedness, one will in the future reap an extremely unpleasant fate. If one is bitter or angry with human beings because they show no gratitude for one's help and friendship one mixes weeds into one's previously good seed. And if one complains to other human beings about these "ungrateful brutes" one sows seed that is extremely poisonous and deadly. One sows antipathy and this seed becomes even worse in relation to how receptive a soil it is sown in. If the human beings that one complains to are responsive one can set in motion a great deal of gossip and slander. This can put down its roots in all kinds of poor soil, in which the crop of weeds can be manifold. And as the crop has everything to do with the sower he will not be able to avoid sooner or later reaping the seed of gossip himself. There are even more directly deadly mentally poisonous plants, namely hatred and revenge, that can lead to killing. Also this seed will have to be reaped by the sower for, as Christ said, "all who take the sword will perish by the sword".

Today many human beings are living on the crop of poisonous seed of the past. They have no spiritual bread grain to live on other than this deadly weed, and as a result they have a so-called unhappy fate. They no longer have lost, or have still not developed, the ability to sow good seed. Even though in certain situations the good seed was sown in the wrong soil, and the crop was not as expected, it would nevertheless be completely foolish to begin to sow weeds. It would rapidly multiply and give us a crop that we could not live on but could only die from because the seed would have the effect of killing our zest for life and our joy, and could even have a killing effect in our organism, since hatred, bitterness and disappointment can lead to physical illnesses, which can in turn lead to a great deal of suffering. Human beings' thinking or consciousness is like a big storehouse filled with seed. Our view of life is the cause of which kind of seed we sow, and in which soil we sow it. The good seed is neighbourly love, it is the mental bread grain that will gradually be sown by more and more human beings. Most people still sow it as a kind of mixed seed, in which weeds are mixed in with the seed, and the crop must of course be as expected.

According to the law of cause and effect or the law of karma, every good deed should have its own reward, and it does indeed. If one acts lovingly towards human beings without any thought of their gratitude or repayment, which perhaps one does not get either, one can meet the effect of this action much later, through completely different people, at a time when one had completely forgotten the good deed that one had done at the time. One should not let one hand know what the other is doing. But the helping hand that is stretched out towards us at a time when we need it might be the effect of the hand that we ourselves at one time stretched out when one of our fellow beings was in need of help.